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It’s hard to believe, but the NHL once considered television a threat to its bottom line.

The first NHL game ever televised in Canada — on Oct. 11, 1952 — was broadcast only from the start of the third period due to protests from the Montreal Canadiens, who believed showing games live would eat into ticket sales.

Citing the same fear, NHL president Clarence Campbell resisted the incursion of TV for years. But he also feared it would give hockey a bad rap.

“Fights, injuries, boarding and other rough tactics are the easiest to catch on television,” he told The Hockey News in 1949. “On the other hand, the fast end-to-end rushes, the skillful, attractive features of the game are most difficult to portray because of TV’s limited field of view.”

That “limited field of view” has expanded in the ensuing six decades far beyond anything Campbell could have imagined. With high-definition images, super-slow-motion replay, optical lenses and remote-controlled skycams, today’s viewer has been afforded more vantages than ever before, while also being drawn closer and closer to the action.

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This past week the NHL announced a partnership with GoPro — the company that makes mountable lightweight cameras tailored to action sports — suggesting that viewers will soon be pulled onto the ice itself.

“From a fan’s perspective it’s a crazy, exciting time,” said Shawn Haswell, manager of production and facilities at Ryerson University’s RTA School of Media.

Meanwhile, rather than an impediment to league revenue as Campbell once feared, TV is now its main driver. Rogers Sportsnet, which spent $5.2 billion on national broadcasting rights for the NHL for the next dozen years (NBC paid $2 billion for a 10-year deal in the U.S), launches its new-look coverage Wednesday night with the opening of the NHL season.

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Morgan Campbell gets a look into the Rogers Sportnet's newly unveiled 4.5 million dollar studio, designed for their NHL coverage.(Vince Talotta/Toronto STar)

On Monday Sportsnet will unveil the “revolutionary technology” it plans to use, expected to include high-def cameras worn by referees during games.

Initially the NHL’s GoPro footage will only be used for promotional purposes, but it likely won’t be long until such technology is weaved into the live play-by-play, said Haswell, who added that sports broadcasts are competing not only with other TV shows but also video games and movies, all of which are moving towards more intimate and interactive viewing experiences. “It’s a fight for attention, right? So if they can differentiate themselves in some way they’re better able to stand out.”

In the NFL — perhaps the most photogenic of all sports — fans have had the feeling of being on the field for years, thanks to the robotic skycams that hover behind the quarterback, which have not only changed how viewers watch the game but how they understand it.

By the same token, Major League Baseball will next season introduce player-tracking technology in all 30 ballparks, feeding real-time data — such as how far an outfielder travels to make a diving catch, or the speed of a baserunner who steals second — into game telecasts and live streams.

“It’s going to change the way fans see the players and their amazing athletic feats,” said Matt Gould, vice-president of communications for Major League Baseball Advanced Media.

In order to track the players’ movements on the field, MLB integrates three different technologies: a radar system that tracks the pitched and batted balls, cameras equipped with optical lenses to capture all the players’ movements and that information is rendered together with more standard video.

The precedent for MLB’s latest innovation is Pitchf/x, which provides detailed data on every pitch thrown, from the velocity to the type of spin to whether it is in the strike zone, and has been in place since 2007. That information has been heavily incorporated into telecasts to the point where some networks leave the pitch-tracker graphic on screen for the entire game.

The player tracking information may not be as immediately ubiquitous, but Gould hopes it will soon be a seamless part of the viewing experience.

“The data that can come from this is so valuable because it gives you a quantifiable but very entertaining and interesting look at the incredible athletic achievements that happen over the course of a nine-inning game,” he said.

Haswell said that when introducing new technologies there is a risk of “jarring” the viewer — remember Fox Sports’ short-lived glowing puck? — so the key is to give fans something they forget they ever lived without, like the NFL’s Skycam. “It felt like something that should have been there or could have been there the whole time — it fit in.”

The GoPro cameras could potentially be very different, said Brian Withers, Haswell’s colleague and a supervising producer at Ryerson’s School of Media.

Withers pointed out that the NHL already uses a point-of-view camera in the NetCam, but it is fixed to a specific spot, unlike the GoPro cameras or whatever Rogers has planned, which will be mounted on players’ or referees’ helmets.

“It’s quite likely that much of that footage will not be watchable,” said Withers, who expects it to be used sparingly in the early stages. “Once it goes through the ringer they’ll study when and how often they’ll be able to incorporate it into a live broadcast without throwing the viewer off.”

Granted, of all the major pro sports, hockey may be the most difficult to televise given its dimensions and the speed at which the game changes direction. But the onslaught of outdoor games has increased the league’s and the networks’ experimentation with new camera technologies and Lepore said he hopes that will continue.

Lepore suggested that Hollywood has also pushed some of this forward as hockey movies are increasingly getting better at capturing the game’s speed and fluid movements. “Whenever I take someone to a hockey game for the first time the first things they notice are how big the players are and how fast the players are, and I think that’s the goal of these GoPro cameras, to get you up to speed with how fast the game is, how big the game is.”

What’s next in sports TV? How about fans adding to the broadcast themselves.

The technology already exists for fans inside a sports venue to upload their own videos to a server that would then incorporate those videos into a broadcast or post them on the stadium video board, Haswell said.

Imagine a camera-phone video taken by a fan sitting in the section of seats where a home run was hit, or a Vine clip of fans celebrating a goal behind the net at the Air Canada Centre. Those soon could be part of a broadcast.

“It’s not so much ‘Will this happen?’ It’s already happening,” Haswell said. “It’s just that it hasn’t really exploded yet, but there’s no question in my mind that it’s coming.”

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